I Heart Book Chapters on "Building Resilience in All Children"

Building Resilience in All Children

A Public Health Approach

Emily B. Winslow, Irwin N. Sandler, and

Sharlene A. Wolchik

In this chapter, we present a conceptual framework for the promotion of resilience in children that integrates concepts from the study of resilience with a public health approach to improving mental health at the population level. The chapter begins with a review of resilience and public health concepts and describes how these perspectives can be integrated within a broad framework for the promotion of health and prevention of dysfunction.

We then present examples of evidence-based preventive interventions and policies that have successfully implemented components of this framework. Given our focus on promoting resilience, we limit discussion and examples of interventions to those designed to create resources for children not diagnosed with mental health disorder, although the framework could readily be extended to interventions for children with clinical levels of dysfunction. Finally, we provide an overview of how the framework might be used by planners to create resources in their communities that will promote resilience, as well as examples of tools currently available to assist planners in this process.

Okay, this is when I think that everything I have done, seemingly intentionally or not, has lead me to this moment. Before grad school (MSW), I worked in health education/health promotion. I was immersed in a public health approach to prevent and address HIV, substance abuse, teen pregnancy, etc. I learned some great theories and frameworks for conceptualizing problems and developing programs and intervention strategies. It only makes sense that I would gravitate to this way of thinking when addressing school-wide mental health and resilience.

It's like the story about the two social workers who went fishing and found dead bodies floating around their boat. As they pulled one body into the boat and attempted to resuscitate it, they immediately saw another in the water. And so on, and so on, and so on... Finally, one of the two social workers said, "I'll leave you to continue this work while I swim upstream and try to figure out what the heck is causing all these dead bodies in the first place!"

It's all important - universal interventions for all (tier one), selected interventions for some (tier two) and intensive interventions for a few (tier three). But if we really do tier one interventions well, then there are less people needing more - which means more healthy people in the first place.